Girly-Sound to Guyville: The 25th Anniversary Box Set

Liz Phair’s indelible, essential debut album has been reissued with three crucial bedroom tapes that further define the innovative and unselfconscious songwriting from early in her career.

If you, like me, were a mopey and searching 13-year-old when Matador first released Exile in Guyville, then perhaps you, too, consider it the sacred text of your youth. Now, 25 years later, Exile remains a kind of sanctified codex for girls: the map that pointed us toward adulthood, or something like it.

Phair began making music in 1991. She was newly graduated from Oberlin College and had prodigally returned to the leafy, affluent suburbs of Chicago, where she’d come of age a decade before. Back in her parents’ house, she wrote and recorded three cassettes of candid, yearning indie rock that she never expected anybody else to hear or pay attention to. Eventually, those tapes got dubbed and passed around by the few friends she’d shared them with—rarified talismans exchanged among the privileged. Imagine what it must’ve felt like to cram one into your car stereo that summer, to hear such a pure and instinctive voice opining the vagaries of romance, love, rejection, and what it means to want more than you’ve got.

Back then, Phair called herself Girly-Sound. The appellation itself feels like a key to Phair’s particular brand of feminism. Rather than trying to pass amid the brooding, self-serious punks of Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood—the scene she called Guyville—she both embraced and trumpeted her girliness, even when it required admitting to certain plainly uncool vulnerabilities.

Those three tapes—Yo Yo Buddy Yup Yup Word to Ya Muthuh, Girls! Girls! Girls!, and Sooty, which were collected and beautifully re-mastered for inclusion on this reissue—contain some of the least self-conscious music I’ve ever heard. Some of that can be attributed to the intimacy of her chosen recording space—anyone who’s ever stomped upstairs, yanked a diary out from under the mattress, and started scrawling hysterical proclamations in it understands the heavy emotional sanctity of the suburban bedroom. But Phair possessed an uncommon frankness, and nerve to match. The indie ethos of the early ’90s was supposedly about candor and integrity, but it often manifested as its own kind of neurotic performance—an alienating mix of frigid indifference and unearned righteousness. Phair seemed, in her way, entirely allergic to its bullshit. She just said what she felt, without negotiation.

Which isn’t to say she didn’t suffer from the scene. The clowns of Guyville, with their apathy and dispassion, animate these songs, unnerving and frustrating her. She wants consequences: “Whatever happened to a boyfriend? The kind of guy who tries to win you over?” she wonders on the first verse of “Fuck and Run,” which she initially recorded for Girls! Girls! Girls!. Her bluntness on the chorus—“I want a boyfriend/I want all that stupid old shit/Like letters and sodas”—was so deeply revelatory to me as a teenager. I simply did not know that people could say this sort of stuff out loud. What a brave and wild thing, to be that honest about what you longed for! I still thought hunger itself was a sin. The women I admired—Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, PJ Harvey—felt radical in part because they appeared so needless. Phair had desires, and some of them were embarrassing, and she sang about them anyway.

Somewhere along the way, Phair had the idea to model Exile in Guyville after the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, though its homage was more theoretical than explicit. She was responding, at first, to the vague but salient idea of the Stones as a kind of bastion of louche male insouciance and to the hegemony of the rock canon more generally. That she hadn’t actually heard that record before she started making her own only seems indicative of the strange pervasiveness of those ideas: If you were hanging around dudes, Keith and Jagger were in the air. Their significance was nearly extra-musical.

The album isn’t a song-by-song response, as it was sometimes positioned. It’s sexy like the Stones, and, in moments, unbearably tender. But it’s also funnier than anything the Stones ever did, and infinitely more self-deprecating. “Divorce Song,” a jangly, buoyant guitar jam about a road trip that turns catastrophic, feels like a tiny, domestic movie: “And it’s true that I stole your lighter/And it’s also true that I lost the map/But when you said that I wasn’t worth talking to/I had to take your word on that,” Phair sings. Who hasn’t had one of those arguments with a partner or lover, where a thing that once felt indestructible starts to collapse, only you’ve still got to check into a motel with that person and eat pancakes across from them? This is Phair’s sweet spot as a narrator, seeing and recounting the real, oafish transactions between imperfect people, all the terrible moments we know but can’t bear to articulate.

Though she would later explore her range more fully, in 1993, Phair sang only in a low, monotone voice that felt close and confessional. She’d taught herself how to play guitar, and because she hadn’t been schooled in all the foundational moves, she inadvertently invented her own kind of scrappy and idiosyncratic style. She also didn’t seem particularly interested in persona, which allowed her fans to believe they were being let in on some kind of secret. Listening to Exile in Guyville still feels this way: Like someone is telling you that all the weird, uncomfortable things you think and worry about are, in fact, just ordinary fears. Those feelings, it turns out, are simply the fallout of being alive.